Personal Video Recorders such as provided by TiVo and computer based systems for digital video recorders such as Windows Media Centre developed by Microsoft are well known. These systems allow a user to schedule programs by means of an electronic program guide. Programs can be recorded on a hard disk drive for subsequent playback at the convenience of the user.
However, given the increasing number of channels available and hence the increasing complexity of the electronic program guide, browsing such guides is time consuming, and it is therefore difficult for users to manually schedule the programs that are to their liking for recordal and/or viewing.
Furthermore, in many existing systems, a large number of programs are recorded and the user must go through a menu hierarchy to browse recorded programs for playback. This has proved to be cumbersome and time consuming. Further, the hard disk drive has limited capacity and soon becomes full. Therefore, the user must browse the recorded program to select an item for deletion before recordal of a new item.
Some of these issues are solved by the creation of a virtual channel (or a personalized content channel) as disclosed, for example in WO-02/080552 and WO 00/40021. A virtual channel comprises a concatenation of content items. WO-02/080552 (US2002-0144282 A1) and WO 00/40021 (U.S. Ser. No. 09/469,875) are herein incorporated by reference.
Each personalized content channel can represent a topic that is clearly recognized by the user, for example, the News channel, the Football channel, the Friends series channel, or the Movie channel. For each personalized content channel there is a (boolean) filter that operates on the entire space of upcoming programs. The programs that pass the filter are automatically scheduled for recording, and made available in the corresponding channel as soon as the recording has started or has been completed. A priority scheme can be employed to resolve any recording conflicts among programs.
Available programs in a personalized content channel can be sequenced and can be deleted depending on the main genre associated with the personalized channel. For example, in a News channel the “freshest” news program is shown first, and only one episode of each different program is kept, in particular as soon as today's 20:00 h newsflash is entirely recorded, yesterday's 20:00 h newsflash will be deleted. A Series channel starts playback at the location where the user left off watching the channel. The position where watching was stopped may be stored so that future playback can commence at the stored position i.e. at the point the user left off watching. It could also be envisaged that, say, the last 5 “where stopped watching” positions may be stored to accommodate usage of the same channel by different users. A deletion strategy may be based on these positions, for example a program that has been watched completely by all users is immediately deleted. In another example, a fixed number of episodes, say, the five most recent ones, are kept on the personalized channel and any earlier episodes deleted.
A personalized content channel is usually accessed as if it were a usual TV channel, e.g. by using channel selection buttons on a remote control and/or by using an electronic program guide. However, since the programs can be recorded, the channel offers the additional benefit of forward/backward picture search, skipping commercials and/or jumping to the next program.
A drawback of the known personalized content channels (i.e. virtual channels) is that the content items played out on the personalized content channels are very predictable, i.e. the known personalized content channels do not provide the user with surprising recommendations.